E3 2016: EA Play Press Conference Details!

EA kicked off the E3, or near-E3, festivities with EA Play. This year, EA has forgone the usual E3 conference to hold their own event. EA Play, taking place simultaneously in Los Angeles and London, opened with their the conference we’d normally see at E3. The reason for this change of format was to create more of an event in which attendees could get hands-on with the games on show. EA have a pretty good idea here, as they’re focusing on letting Youtubers and gaming press get in-depth looks at the games, knowing that this is the best kind of exposure they can get. It’s one thing to put their games on a screen, but when these respected and liked personalities go make videos or tweet about how great these games are, many more people are going to want in. This was EA‘s big show of the week, and here’s what we took away from it.

Andrew Wilson took the stage to kick off the show in L.A., while Peter Moore helmed the event in London. Throughout the show, the focus jumped between the two locations, which must have been a logistical nightmare, but EA wants you to know that they have money, I guess. The conference ran for an hour, and hit all the notes we’ve come to expect from EA at E3. This year, three games dominated focus, being Titanfall 2, Mass Effect Andromeda and Battlefield One. As announced, Titanfall 2 got it’s proper reveal at EA Play. Powering through a leak earlier in the day, Respawn head Vince Zampella came on stage to present the next game in the Titanfall series. They kicked off with a multiplayer trailer, showing some of the new features coming to the game. He hit us with the important date, October 28th is when we can play the game on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, with a multplayer beta/stress test to be announced. Mr. Zampella had one more trailer to share, this one to show off the single player campaign in Titanfall 2. One of the biggest complaints about the first game was a lack of a single player, or a traditional story mode. Titanfall 2 will come with a fully fleshed out campaign, which promises to expand on the universe and the characters of the first game.

After Titanfall, we jumped into the sports games. Oddly, on their own show, EA decided to go a little lighter on their range of sports titles, focusing mainly on the two big ones; FIFA and Madden. With Madden, they talked about putting more focus on the competitive scene, saying we can expect to see a lot more EA-backed tournaments for bigger prizes, such as the competition between two of the best Madden players in the world, Serious Moe and Problem. FIFA has some interesting new features, including adding real-life Premiership managers to the game. Seeing the promise in what 2K did with their latest NBA game,FIFA 17 will feature a story mode, in which players can create themselves and play through the life of a footballer trying to make their way to the top, very much looking like Spike Lee’s “Livin da’ Dream” in 2k16. No mention of NBA Live or NHL 17, but as we’ll discuss, this show was fairly thin overall.

Back to the gamer games, next we come to probably the most anticipated game of the show, Mass Effect Andromeda. Mostly due to having shown very little so far, Andromeda was on the minds of many going into EA Play. We hoped for gameplay, details, possibly a release date. We got a developer diary. Are you sighing? We sighed. Yes, sadly nothing very solid yet on Andromeda, only the general jist of the back story. After the events of the Mass Effect trilogy, humanity must look further afield to find somewhere to live on. You and your crew are sent to the Andromeda galaxy, to explore and discover. They made a real emphasis on the fact that you are now the alien, a foreign invader and you need to be prepared for that. Honestly, what we saw of it looked amazing, and that’s why we’re a little disappointed. We really want more. The developer video is below, including the couple of little tidbits we’ve got to go on, we here at Geek Ireland are super excited for this game, and our disappointment at the lack of content on show is meant as a compliment to this game and the series it comes from.

EA had a couple of interesting extras to talk about, such as having gamers take part in challenges over the week to raise money for charity. During the show, EA announced Fe, an indie title from Swedish studio Zoink Games. Like with Unravelled last year, EA are dipping their toe into publishing for independent studios, giving rise to EA Originals, a new facet of the company. EA Originals exists to help indie developers get their games made and out to the public. They have promised to make sure that all the money these games make will go right back to the creators, so they can continue to build great games. EA have spent the last couple of years doing everything they can to reverse the negative reputation they had, and whether or not that can ever truly be changed is yet to be seen, but kudos to them for trying. Star Wars got a mention here, and if you’re concerned by the fact that I’m not giving Star Wars it’s own paragraph, you are right to be concerned, but how dare you question my writing ability, I’m almost a professional, I’ll have you know. Yes, though EA have the exclusive rights to making Star Wars games, they had little to show at the press conference. They drew attention to Battlefront and The Old Republic, and teased the future of Star Wars games. We already knew that Respawn, makers of Titanfall, and Visceral, creators of Dead Space, were both working on games in the Star Wars universe. We now know they are both expected sometime in 2018 (ouch), and we got a glimpse of the action-adventure game Visceral are working on with industry veteran Amy Hennig, who wrote some game called Uncharted, but whatever, who cares about that dumb game. Pfffft.

The main event of the evening was always going to be Battlefield One. Revealed at another press event last month, DICE promised to show more of the next Battlefield game at EA Play, and they did not disappoint. The latest trailer is below, but the best look at the game came from the post-conference 64 player match, as Battlefield is known for, between Team Neebs and Team Stonemountain64. The two teams comprised of Youtubers, popular Battlefield players, and a whole bunch of celebrities, many of whom were too high to know what the hell was going on. That’s not an insinuation, Snoop and Wiz Khalifa were opening smoking throughout the entire match, which may have been a form of chemical warfare on the part of one Snoop Dogg, who came to play, knowing he could handle playing while under the influence, whereas Zac Efron and others visibly could not. Honestly, it was fun to watch, but more fun was seeing how great Battlefield One is in action. I’m sure the stream is archived and can be found on Twitch or Youtube, but to put it into words, imagine a Battlefield game that took all the tech that went into Star Wars Battlefront and ran with it. It needs to be seen to be understood, but this is an amazing looking game. Also interesting are the new behemoth vehicles, and the dynamic weather system. DICE have taken some of the more impressive features of Battlefield 4 and improved on them hugely. Where BF4 had scripted weather changes during games, BF1 will have dynamic and random weather changes, where games can go from clear, sunny weather, to downpours of rain that change visibility and the flow of battle. In BF1, there will be gigantic, fully controllable vehicles, the one we saw was the airship. It seems that one of the teams has to win control of this airship, and whoever does gets a serious spike in air supremacy. What’s most interesting about this, was that should the airship be destroyed, it comes crashing to the ground in incredible fashion, imagine the skyscraper in Shanghai from BF4, only it falls from the sky and could land anywhere on the map. It seems that with Battlefield One, DICE are taking some of their ground-breaking innovations from games passed, and innovating a step further with them.

Although it had it’s high points, the EA Play conference was pretty thin on content. There were no real shock announcements, mainly just expanding on previously known news, and making expected reveals. Probably the most underwhelming part of the show was the lack of Star Wars news, all we really learned was that all the Star Wars games we want to see are still very far away. It may have been a good idea for EA to separate from E3 this year, and focus more on getting the games they have into players’ hands, as they had little to reveal and frankly aren’t going to be who everyone is talking about when E3 is done. Their showing was light, but what they had to show was good. EA had an appropriate show for what they had to work with, and overall did a good job, surprisingly subtle for EA.